I hadn’t heard of movable type before skimming that post but I would argue that a lot of web homogenisation nowadays is because of iPhones and iPads. In the ear

I hadn’t heard of movable type before skimming that post but I would argue that a lot of web homogenisation nowadays is because of iPhones and iPads. In the early days, there were only computers so you knew that whoever was going to be interacting with your site was doing so through a keyboard and mouse and using a monitor. Now you don’t know if your user is interacting via a touch screen or mouse nor what size their screen is going to be. To fix this, people started gravitating towards certain ways of doing things to ensure a better user experience. You absolutely can make a weird old style blog, but getting it to look nice on an iPhone will likely be a pain in the arse so you either have to invest time in coding and testing it at different screen sizes or accept that the site is only going to be usable by desktop users. Everything is a tradeoff.